Topic Exploration

Health Concerns within the Beauty Industry

When it came to outlining the research space, I wanted to focus on a variety of problems that lead to the overall health concerns within the beauty industry, and thus additionally keep it open ended for the time in potential design intervention spaces.

The main areas contributing to the overarching health concerns are the continued use of harmful chemicals by big name beauty companies, the greenwashing of packaging- promoting false or inflated claims of cleanliness, the unknown affects using specific chemicals within products can have on the body, and an unknown of cleaner beauty companies/where to start when it comes to transitioning to cleaner beauty products.

The areas of consideration I’m currently exploring with the campaign solution route are:

Information Hierarchy- not all information touchpoints are going to be able to be treated the same. Some will communicate more than others and as a result there needs to be a hierarchy outlined as to what is the most important information to communicate. To outline this I’ve tier the information in the following order of importance: Tier 1- chemicals of concerns within beauty products, Tier 2- the health affects of using products with harmful chemicals in them, and Tier 3- alternative clean beauty solutions.

Tone- with a campaign it’s not only what are you saying, but how are you saying it. The tone helps to not only bring users in, but it affects how the users understand, interpret, and digest the information. There’s a variety of tone approaches different cosmetic companies take to reach their wide audience, so my initial tone research focused on looking into a range of these companies and how their tones vary within the market.

Motivations- what is the overall message of the campaign? The most successful campaigns are brought to life through clear messaging so the user know exxactly what is being communicated. With my information hierarchy I’ve taken into consideration with each tier- what is the hook? what is going to draw the user in? while also considering from an overarching campaign standpoint what is the communication focus? The main drive behind the campaign is to bring an overall awareness to the harmful concerns within everyday beauty products consumers stand to be unaware of.

When it came to outlining research, I wanted to break it apart by the previously outlined information tiers to make it more manageable. Organizing the information in this way allows for more clarity in what is a higher concern as well as raising areas of concern that hadn’t previously been considered.

Before breaking down what specific chemicals of concern where in specific beauty products, the consideration of how to make those naturally unrecognizable ingredients mean something to a viewer wasn’t something I had deeply considered. I had previously contemplated on the approach to portray them as other products that would be more meaningful to an audience, but never in their natural state.

By pulling on the comparison of harmful ingredients to other products that said ingredient is additionally found in, it bridges that gap of unknown ingredients with unknown names and makes it more digestible to a viewer, but it also poses the question: will they understand the relation?

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